The old adage about corn being "knee-high by the 4th of July" is obviously outdated. Henry A. Wallace, native Iowan and Vice President under Franklin Roosevelt, began hybridizing corn at the age of 12, while his father was a professor at the Iowa State University of Science and Technology (the one in Ames, not Iowa City), and befriended a student experimenting with peanuts by the name of George Washington Carver. A wonderful biography of Wallace was written several years ago by former Iowa senator John Culver, whose son Chet is our current governor. (They're Democrats, if you were wondering). The jacket of the book features Iowa artist Grant Wood's portrait of Wallace against a farm field, which I am mimicking (poorly) in this photo. The other, more relevant photos show that our nascent house has been backfilled, and is anxiously awaiting a frame to be built upon it! The view from a distance had been obscured until today, and this is where we've marked a spot from which to take pictures and create a time-lapse series. This is the point from which the very first ground breaking photo on the blog was taken.
